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Following a legacy of four and a half centuries of literature written by foreign travelers landing on Haiti's shores, Alejo Carpentier's seminal novel about the Haitian Revolution is predicated upon Carpentier's voyage to Haiti six years earlier. This article attends to the role of voyage in Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World , revealing the ways in which Carpentier's storytelling and rendering of Haiti in both the novel and its prologue, and his accompanying theory of the marvelous real, adhere to Eurocentric conceptions of time that reinscribe this neocolonial space as anachronistic space. Because Carpentier can only perceive Haiti in the past, he replicates the role of the imperial travel writer in fashioning metropolitan conceptions of colonial spaces and reproduces the imbalance of power between visitor/visited. This perspective reinforces a dominant Euro-American image of Haiti as a strange and magical object of consumption and fails to imagine it as an independent, post-revolution state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alejo Carpentier’s 1949 novel The Kingdom of This World appropriates aesthetic principles of the Baroque and surrealism to re-narrativize the Haitian Revolution from the perspectives of minor figures, thus challenging the reader to recognize not only the limits of epistemological perspective to organize reality, but the capacity to escape those limits. For Carpentier, lo real maravilloso both reveals and moves beyond European narrative structures. This article suggests that The Kingdom of This World demonstrates the minoritarian potential of lo real maravilloso when the narrative facilitates a recognition of the disjunctive quality of Enlightenment- and modernity-coded reality, which is the first step towards producing alternative realities and narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]